JUST JUST SO:

It's not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that's precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith's paper tried to do. "Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?" describes a major issue with evolutionary psychology, called the matching problem. [...]

Gizmodo: Your paper's main refutation of the field is something called the matching problem. Can you explain what that is?  

Subrena Smith: Evolutionary psychologists' thought is that, for at least some of our behaviors, they believe that we have--dare I use this term--hard-wired cognitive structures that are operating in all of us contemporary human beings the same way they did for our ancestors on the savannas. The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring--the cognitive structure of the brain itself--is not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn't passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance--that our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors' brains. The sameness in how our brains work is on account of genetic selection for particular modules that are still functional in our environment today. [Editor's note: These "modules" refer to the idea that the brain can be divided up into discrete structures with specific functions.]

The matching problem is really the core issue that evolutionary psychologists have to show that they can meet: that there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors; that they're working the same way then as now; and that these modules are working the same way because they are descended from the same functional lineage or causal lineage. But I don't see any way that these charges can be answered. [...]

Gizmodo: Can you give some examples of scenarios of the matching problem in action?

Smith: Here's the problem. With respect to human beings, we don't have the relevant evidence about how our ancestors behaved to make any substantiative claims. We can only use evidence of our behavior and evidence of the likely kinds of behaviors that they would have exhibited in the past. We know that ancient humans avoided predation, for instance. What exactly they did is something evolutionary psychologists have to show. Did our ancestors avoid predation because they were good at hiding in bushes or because they were running? Evolutionary psychologists would say that the better explanation is that they were running. But the fact that they ran to avoid predation and the fact that we have the disposition to run when we're endangered still does not establish that there's a singular module doing both of those jobs.

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